KENAT
Mechanical
- Jun 12, 2006
- 18,387
Last night I caught a show called ‘future cars’ on discovery at 8pm (California, US).
This is a short series I’ve seen advertised which discusses what cars will be like in the future (hence the title) and looks at some of the technology involved. Last night seemed to be focusing on alternative fuels/power sources.
I missed the first 15 minutes or so which I gather covered ethanol.
However, I tuned in just in time to see a very interesting segment on a process which seemed to claim to be able to make bio diesel from pretty much any organic matter. I vaguely recalled seeing this in an article before, to which my initial response was ‘sounds too good to be true’ but it caught my interest so I watched. When they went into more detail the material they were using was mainly non metallic waste from scrapped cars, i.e. mostly plastics (they showed images of tires but didn’t explicitly say you could use them when discussing the process) so it’s not that surprising they could turn it into diesel as that’s pretty much what it started out as, but interesting none the less. They didn’t go into the relative efficiencies of this process compared to just burning the polymers for energy but did point out this process doesn’t release some of the nasty chemicals that burning plastic can.
My interest piqued I avidly watched wondering what would come up next; you guessed it, that old chestnut the ‘water powered car’. As usual they actually meant a hydrogen powered car with the hydrogen generated by electrolysis of water. In fairness some of the ‘experts’ did try to make it clear that water wasn’t the actual energy source but with the editing and some of the wording I’m sure this escaped many non technical viewers who are now expecting to be able to fill their cars up with tap water in the next few years!
What really got me was the they had the Vice President of R & D at GM saying something along the lines of
I have two concerns about this, the lesser of which is how can it be very efficient to generate hydrogen from water using electricity, carry it round in the tank in your car for a period of time/distance, then convert it back to electricity to power your house/feed the grid (from which the original electricity presumably came).
Secondly, was he absent from high school the day a little thing called ‘conservation of energy’ was brought up and then missed every thermodynamics lecture at university? Of course, if GM is anything like my company then just because he’s the head of a technical department doesn’t mean he’s an engineer or scientist, he’s just as likely to be from Sales or Marketing. None the less he was being portrayed on the show as an expert, presumably a scientist or Engineer and yet came out with this twaddle.
The show looked like it was going to end on a high note with a surprisingly good-looking ‘compressed air’ car. I’d always thought the energy wouldn’t be ‘dense’ enough to be useful but the vehicle they showed looked quite interesting.
Then disaster, just before the closing credits the narrator starts talking about how the compressed air car designers have also come up with an air compressor which itself runs off of compressed air!
Anyone see where this is going…
The narrator then starts talking about putting one of these compressors in the vehicle so it could generate its own compressed air, meaning it would never need ‘re-fueling’ – perpetual motion.
After I’d stopped banging my head against the wall and throwing things at the TV it got me thinking.
If the only time the general public sees many types of engineers is on this kind of show, and they are either spouting nonsense or at least made to look like they’re spouting nonsense due to poor journalism, then no wonder we don’t have any status as an earlier thread was bemoaning.
This isn’t an isolated incident. I watch quite a few programs on Discovery and History channel that cover engineering and often spot errors or at least doubt some of the information, but this was unusually bad.
Discovery and History channel don’t have the monopoly I also remember a show on BBC2 a few years ago where they were trying to get some members of the public to understand how a wing on a plane generates lift. They rolled out the usual nonsense about the upper surface of the wing being more curved than the lower surface so that the air molecules have further to travel so have to magically move faster so as to be at the back of the wing at the same time as those going under it. The concerning thing was that one of the people explaining this was the head of wing development for Airbus (then part of BAe)!!! If he doesn’t know why a wing works what chance does Engineering stand, or again is he actually a non technical person?
Just had to vent, sorry. Perhaps my manager had a point about my frustration;-).
This is a short series I’ve seen advertised which discusses what cars will be like in the future (hence the title) and looks at some of the technology involved. Last night seemed to be focusing on alternative fuels/power sources.
I missed the first 15 minutes or so which I gather covered ethanol.
However, I tuned in just in time to see a very interesting segment on a process which seemed to claim to be able to make bio diesel from pretty much any organic matter. I vaguely recalled seeing this in an article before, to which my initial response was ‘sounds too good to be true’ but it caught my interest so I watched. When they went into more detail the material they were using was mainly non metallic waste from scrapped cars, i.e. mostly plastics (they showed images of tires but didn’t explicitly say you could use them when discussing the process) so it’s not that surprising they could turn it into diesel as that’s pretty much what it started out as, but interesting none the less. They didn’t go into the relative efficiencies of this process compared to just burning the polymers for energy but did point out this process doesn’t release some of the nasty chemicals that burning plastic can.
My interest piqued I avidly watched wondering what would come up next; you guessed it, that old chestnut the ‘water powered car’. As usual they actually meant a hydrogen powered car with the hydrogen generated by electrolysis of water. In fairness some of the ‘experts’ did try to make it clear that water wasn’t the actual energy source but with the editing and some of the wording I’m sure this escaped many non technical viewers who are now expecting to be able to fill their cars up with tap water in the next few years!
What really got me was the they had the Vice President of R & D at GM saying something along the lines of
.
I have two concerns about this, the lesser of which is how can it be very efficient to generate hydrogen from water using electricity, carry it round in the tank in your car for a period of time/distance, then convert it back to electricity to power your house/feed the grid (from which the original electricity presumably came).
Secondly, was he absent from high school the day a little thing called ‘conservation of energy’ was brought up and then missed every thermodynamics lecture at university? Of course, if GM is anything like my company then just because he’s the head of a technical department doesn’t mean he’s an engineer or scientist, he’s just as likely to be from Sales or Marketing. None the less he was being portrayed on the show as an expert, presumably a scientist or Engineer and yet came out with this twaddle.
The show looked like it was going to end on a high note with a surprisingly good-looking ‘compressed air’ car. I’d always thought the energy wouldn’t be ‘dense’ enough to be useful but the vehicle they showed looked quite interesting.
Then disaster, just before the closing credits the narrator starts talking about how the compressed air car designers have also come up with an air compressor which itself runs off of compressed air!
Anyone see where this is going…
The narrator then starts talking about putting one of these compressors in the vehicle so it could generate its own compressed air, meaning it would never need ‘re-fueling’ – perpetual motion.
After I’d stopped banging my head against the wall and throwing things at the TV it got me thinking.
If the only time the general public sees many types of engineers is on this kind of show, and they are either spouting nonsense or at least made to look like they’re spouting nonsense due to poor journalism, then no wonder we don’t have any status as an earlier thread was bemoaning.
This isn’t an isolated incident. I watch quite a few programs on Discovery and History channel that cover engineering and often spot errors or at least doubt some of the information, but this was unusually bad.
Discovery and History channel don’t have the monopoly I also remember a show on BBC2 a few years ago where they were trying to get some members of the public to understand how a wing on a plane generates lift. They rolled out the usual nonsense about the upper surface of the wing being more curved than the lower surface so that the air molecules have further to travel so have to magically move faster so as to be at the back of the wing at the same time as those going under it. The concerning thing was that one of the people explaining this was the head of wing development for Airbus (then part of BAe)!!! If he doesn’t know why a wing works what chance does Engineering stand, or again is he actually a non technical person?
Just had to vent, sorry. Perhaps my manager had a point about my frustration;-).
![[bat]](/data/assets/smilies/bat.gif "[bat] [bat]")
